Richard Linklater’s latest film Boyhood has earned quite a lot of press by accomplishing the unprecedented cinematic feat of telling a story over a decade long with a production over a decade long, following the same characters, played by the same growing and aging actors, the whole time through. Viewers have understandably found it a striking viewing experience, but most of Linklater’s projects do something no other film has done before. His 1990s “Indiewood” breakout Slacker(watch it online), for instance, offered not just the portrait of the so-called Generation‑X, and not just a portrait of the then-rising American countercultural Mecca of Austin, Texas, but a form of storytelling that seemed to drift freely from one character to the next, crossing town on the winds of idle, everyday, intense, and even nonsensical conversation.
And what does Waking Life do? Released in 2001, Linklater’s first animated film (he would make a second, the Philip K. Dick adaptation A Scanner Darkly, in 2006) not only further develops the neglected branch of animation known as rotoscoping, which involves drawing over live-action footage, but puts it to work for the cause of the philosophical film. But rather than approaching that enterprise straight on, the movie interprets the philosophy with which it deals through a vast cast of characters both eccentric and mundane — intellectuals, often, but also crackpots, gadflies, and just plain slackers. When they speak their thoughts aloud, as they do in the short clips featured here, they speak on themes as varied, but as intriguingly interconnected, as reality, free will, anarchy, suicide, and cinema, all of which the animation vividly illustrates.
“Waking Life could not come at a better time,” wrote Roger Ebert when the movie opened, less than a month after 9/11. “It celebrates a series of articulate, intelligent characters who seek out the meaning of their existence and do not have the answers. At a time when madmen think they have the right to kill us because of what they think they know about an afterlife, which is by definition unknowable, those who don’t know the answers are the only ones asking sane questions. True believers owe it to the rest of us to seek solutions that are reasonable in the visible world.” Some viewers will no doubt write off Waking Life’s dialogue — whether spoken by actors, professors, Linklater regulars, or utter randoms — as mere “dorm room conversation,” but the film seems to ask an important question on that very point: are you really having more interesting conversations now than you did in the dorms?
If you have a subscription to Amazon Prime, you can watch Waking Life for free right now. A version appears on Youtube for $2.99.
There’s never been a bad time to revisit Blade Runner, but now, with all the news about the in-development Blade Runner 2 breaking even as you read this, it seems like an especially appropriate time to go deeper into Ridley Scott’s piece of groundbreaking, Philip K. Dick-adapting cyberpunk cinema. Whatever you think of the prospect of a sequel, if you call yourself a Blade Runner fan, you’ll never turn down a chance for another look behind the scenes of the original.
Hence our offering today of BBC critic Mark Kermode’s documentary above, On the Edge of Blade Runner, and, via Flavorwire, a selection of original storyboards from the film. Few science-fiction movies hold up so well aesthetically after 32 years, but only because few science-fction movies had so much sheer work put into their design — we are still, I imagine, assured a steady stream of production materials to gaze upon for a long time to come.
In recent years, for instance, Sean Young, who played the replicant Rachel, released her Polaroid photos from the film’s set. And if you missed it the first time around, you’ll want to circle back to our post featuring a freely readable online version of Blade Runner Sketchbook, a collection of over 100 production drawings and pieces of artwork that originally came out alongside the film. (See it above.)
And whatever direction Blade Runner 2 takes, promising or less so, we’ll all hear a lot about it in the coming months. So to balance out the coming wave of promotion for the second one, why not watch a little of the promotion of the first one in the form of the convention reel below (produced not least to counter all the bad press the production had drawn at the time), which contains interviews with some of those responsible for Blade Runner’s most enduring qualities: Ridley Scott, “visual futurist” Syd Mead, and visual effects designer Douglas Trumbull. If all three of those guys work on the sequel, well, maybe I’ll start getting excited.
A friend recently told me about a screening of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris he attended in a state of, er, expanded perception. The vivid sci-fi trip he’d expected turned into the most harrowing emotional experience of his life.2001: A Space Odyssey has proven a reliable favorite of the consciousness-altering crowd since it came out in 1968, almost to the point where you’d think Kubrick made the film just for them. But Tarkovsky’s 1972 story of a sentient planet and the hallucinations with which it tempts and torments a nearby space station has an entirely different existential conception of mankind’s venture into the unknown realms of space and time. Whatever your own state of mind, you can watch Solaris free online. (Watch below and make sure click “cc” at the bottom of the videos to launch the subtitles.) If you don’t feel sure about taking the plunge, have a look first at the updated trailer above.
Reworking Stanislaw Lem’s original novel toward his own artistic ends, Tarkovsky realized his vision of the future with a number of unusual techniques. Viewers often take special, bemused notice of the scene above, a five-minute drive down an urban highway which comes just before the protagonist, psychologist Kris Kelvin, departs for his space mission. (Tarkovsky liked to say he put it there to discourage impatient filmgoers.) The clip includes commentary from film scholars Vida Johnson and Graham Petrie. As Johnson explains, “Tarkovsky knew that in order to situate the story in a foreign place and a distant time, both to fulfill genre requirements and deflect potential censors, he needed to contrast his nostalgia for nature and the past with a city of the future.” And so, unable to build such a thing on his limited budget, Tarkovsky went to Tokyo: “The Japanese road signs, the foreign cars, long tunnels, and multi-lane highways with winding bridges and overpasses might have represented a city of the future for early-1970s Soviet audiences used to simple two-lane roads and domestic tin-box cars, if they were lucky enough to have a car at all.”
Petrie references an entry from Tarkovsky’s diaries “where he worries that if the Japanese visa doesn’t come through in time, they will miss the end of the exhibition” — probably Osaka’s thoroughly future-oriented Expo ’70 World’s Fair. (Incidentally, next time you swing by Osaka, I do recommend taking a walk around the still-fascinating Expo ’70 grounds.) Tarkovsky did end up missing the Osaka exhibition, and so he shot in Tokyo instead. At Tarkovsky fan site nostalghia.com, Yuji Kikutake has gone through modern-day Tokyo and found the surviving landmarks of the Akasaka and Iikura neighborhoods over which the sequence passes — revealing the future, in other words, of the city of the future. Whatever you think of the resulting five minutes, the fact that Tarkovsky managed to go shoot them and that the officials in charge funded it demonstrates, as Petrie puts it, not just “the ingenuity of filmmakers trying to penetrate the Iron Curtain,” but “the high esteem in which [Tarkovsky] was held by the same film-industry bureaucrats who made his life miserable by cutting his budgets and trying to censor his films.”
Some of us get our education at film school. More of us get it from The Criterion Collection, that formidably cinephilic restorer, curator, and packager of classic motion pictures from every era. In addition to their elegant, supplementary material-rich home video releases — they’ve put them out on Laserdisc, on DVD, on Blu-ray, streaming over the internet, and will presumably continue to do so on whichever formats come next — they also do intriguing collaborations with the various cultural figures with whom they’ve worked, such as asking them to name their ten favorite Criterion releases. You may recall that, back in June, we featured actor, director, and 1990s “Indiewood” icon Steve Buscemi’s Criterion top ten list, which included such choice pieces of film history as Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, Franco-Dutch horror classic The Vanishing, and long-unreleased “faux-documentary” Symbiopsychotaxiplasm.
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman)
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainier Werner Fassbinder)
Masculin féminin (Jean-Luc Godard)
Double Suicide (Masahiro Shinoda)
The Vanishing (George Sluizer)
Mamma Roma (Pier Paolo Pasolini)
Black Orpheus (Marcel Camus)
Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder)
Night on Earth (Jim Jarmusch)
Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat)
Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick)
Or lists from vital creators who have more recently arrived on the scene, such as this one from Tiny Furniture director and Girls creator Lena Dunham, an inveterate fan of Agnès Varda (who “manages to be both deeply emotional and utterly in control of the technical elements of filmmaking [ … ] that had seemed to me to be an impossible line to straddle, and she does it so beautifully”). She also makes room for Malick’s Days of Heaven, (also a pick of Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon), two from Fassbinder (also a director of choice for Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo), and one from Bergman (who should make everyone’s favorite-films lists, but also made Linklater’s):
Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold)
Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick)
Broadcast News (James L. Brooks)
Weekend (Andrew Haigh)
La Pointe Courte, Cléo from 5 to 7, Le bonheur, and Vagabond (Agnès Varda)
The Marriage of Maria Braun and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainier Werner Fassbinder)
Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir)
Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah) and Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg)
Through a Glass Darkly (Ingmar Bergman)
The War Room (Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker)
D.A. Pennebaker, by the way, has his own Criterion top ten list, as do other filmmakers named here, like Andrew Haigh and Martin Scorsese. But this leaves me with one burning question: if directors like Ozu and Fassbinder had lived to see The Criterion Collection, which volumes would they have put on their own DVD shelves?
How do you follow up on making a children’s movie classic? If you’re Tim Burton, you spin a tale of sex, murder and conceptual art.
On the heels of his feature debut Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Tim Burton adapted Ray Bradbury’s “The Jar” (1944) for an episode of the ‘80s reboot of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In Bradbury’s story, a failing farmer buys a jar with a curious thing floating in it. It is described as “one of those pale things drifting in alcohol plasma … with its peeled, dead eyes staring out at you and never seeing you.” This thing, however, has a peculiar charisma. People come for miles to gawk at it, strangely captivated by its uncanny charm. Well, almost everyone. The farmer’s cheating wife, however, loathes it to the pit of her marrow and when she tries to get rid of it, things take a violent turn.
Burton gives the story a decidedly Reagan-era twist. Instead of being a down-and-out farmer, Knoll (played by Griffin Dunne) is a fading star of the New York art scene. The episode opens with a critic savaging Knoll’s new opening, which is filled with large, preposterous conceptual pieces. The artist flees the show and his belittling harpy of a wife in favor of the local junkyard. There, he pries the titular jar from the trunk of a 1938 Mercedes. Floating inside is what looks like a Dr. Seuss creature drown in Windex. Knoll is both fascinated and repulsed by it. So, naturally, he places it at the center of his show. The results are mixed. Sure, Knoll starts to sell art again but his wife also starts to get stabby with a kitchen knife.
The episode is delicious fun. From the eye-popping color palette to the crisp, graphic direction to the painfully ‘80s hairstyles, this work feels very much a part of the same world as Burton’s next movie, Beetlejuice. In fact, composer Danny Elfman and screenwriters Michael McDowell and Larry Wilson worked on both. You can watch it above.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
There’s no denying that train wrecks make great documentary subjects.
Not that Abraham Lincoln doesn’t, but watching someone come unglued is a whole ‘nother sort of compelling. Upsetting, even.
Docs in this genre usually require the subject to have left the building in order to reach a satisfying conclusion. The final word belongs to an assortment of friends, colleagues, admirers, enemies…some of whom may be harboring ulterior motives.
Surely German chanteuse Nico’s appearance factored into Andy Warhol’s decision to elevate her to Factory superstar status. (See his video of her immediately above.) She was a model after all, arresting enough to have appeared as herself in La Dolce Vita. She romanced rock gods, film directors, and movie stars, many of whom have their say in Susanne Ofteringer’s documentary Nico-Icon, viewable in its entirety up top.
It’s a fascinating, cautionary portrait, but as the backseat psychoanalysis mounted, I found myself wanting to hear from the subject more. With apologies to Neil Diamond fans, we decided it was only fitting to show you Nico having her own say.
Maybe she was a nightmare. Former keyboardist, James Young, wrote a book about his time on tour with her. He’s in the documentary, of course. Aspiring icons, you’ve been forewarned:
When I worked with her her looks were gone and she wasn’t this Chelsea Girl creature, this peroxide blonde Marlene Dietrich moon goddess vamp. She was a middle aged junkie.
Nice. You reckon he might have gone easier on her, had she been one of John Waters’ superstars, the late Edith Massey or the still-thriving Mink Stole?
Forget sticks and stones. It takes a lot more heroin and hard living to kill the looks of anyone with her bone structure.
Did Nico really have such little use for anyone’s approval but her own? The art she made after her iconic work with the Velvet Underground convinces me that her embrace of ugly–what Chelsea Girls director referred to as her “stupid German perversity”–was sincere.
She’s still an enigma trapped in amber. She’ll be your mirror.
As a couple of generations of film students have shown us, you shouldn’t try to imitate David Lynch. You should, however, learn from David Lynch. At his best, the director of Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive has managed, in the words of David Foster Wallace, to “single-handedly broker a new marriage between art and commerce in U.S. movies, opening formula-frozen Hollywood to some of the eccentricity and vigor of art film.” How has Lynch brought his enduringly strange and richly evocative visions to the screen, and to a surprising extent into the mainstream, without much apparent compromise?
You can get an idea of his method in Room to Dream: David Lynch and the Independent Filmmaker, the twenty-minute documentary above. Since Lynch hasn’t released a feature film since 2006’s Inland Empire — an especially uncompromising work, admittedly — some fans have wondered whether he’s put the movies, per se, behind him.
But Room to Dream shows the director in recent years, very much engaged in both the theory and process of filmmaking — or rather, his distinctive interpretations of the theory and process of filmmaking.
This touches on his childhood obsession with drawing weapons, his discovery of “moving paintings,” his endorsement of learning by doing, how he uses digital video, his enjoyment of 40-minute takes, why people fear the “very dark,” conveying meaning without explaining meaning (especially to actors), the process of “rehearsing-and-talking, rehearsing-and-talking,” how Avid (the short’s sponsor, as it would happen) facilitates the “heavy lifting” of editing his footage, how he finesses “happy accidents,” how he composes differently for different screens, and the way that “sometimes things take strange routes that end up being correct.” Take Lynch’s words to heart, and you, too, can enjoy his experience of crafting what he calls “sound and picture moving along in time” — with or without an Avid of your own.
How often does a film adaptation of a novel you love meet your expectations? Circle one: A) Always B) Often C) Rarely D) Never.
I’m guessing most people choose C, with a few falling solidly in the perennially disappointed D camp. There are, of course, those very few films that rise so far above their source material that we needn’t speak of the novel at all. I can think of one off the top of my head, involving a certain well-dressed mobster family.
Then there are adaptations of books that depart so far from the source that any comparison seems like a wasted exercise. Spike Jonze’s Adaptation is one intentional example, one that gleefully revels in its meta-poetic license-taking.
Perhaps no single author save Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or Stephen King has had as many of his works adapted to the screen as sci-fi visionary Philip K. Dick. The results vary, but the force of Dick’s imagination seems to make every cinema version of his novels worth watching, I’d argue.
But all this talk of adaptation brings us to the question that the internet must ask of every subject under the sun: what are nth best films made from novels—list them, damn you! Okay, well, you won’t get just my humble opinion, but the collective votes of hundreds of Guardian readers, circa 2006, when writers Peter Bradshaw and Xan Brooks took a poll, then posted the results as “The Big 50.”
The list includes those dapper mafiosi, but, as I said, I’m not much inclined—nor was Francis Ford Coppola—to Mario Puzo’s novel. But there are several films on the list made from books I do like quite a bit. In the 15 picks below, I like the movies almost or just as much. These are films from The Guardian’s big 50 that I feel do their source novels justice. Go ahead and quibble, rage, or even agree in the comments below—or, by all means, make your own suggestions of cases where film and book meet equally high standards, whether those examples appear on “The Big 50” or not.
1. A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Stanley Kubrick’s take on Anthony Burgess’ 1962 dystopian fable replicates the highly disorienting experience of traversing a fictional world through the eyes of a Beethoven-loving, Nadsat-speaking, sociopath. Malcolm McDowell gives the performance of his career (see above). So distinctive is the set design, it inspired a chain of Korova Milk Bars. Burgess himself had a complicated relationship with the film and its director. Praising the adaptation as brilliant, he also found its bleak, sardonic ending, and omission of the novel’s redemptive final chapter—also missing from U.S. editions of the book prior to 1986—troubling. The film’s relentless ultraviolence, so disturbing to many a viewer, and many a religious organization, also disturbed the author who imagined it.
2. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
A film adaptation with an even more bravado ensemble cast (Danny DeVito, Brad Dourif, Louise Fletcher, Christopher Lloyd) and incredibly charismatic—and dangerous—lead, Jack Nicholson, Milos Forman’s Cuckoo’s Nest stands perfectly well on its own. But lovers of Ken Kesey’s madcap novel have many reasons for favorable comparison. One vast difference between the two, however, lies in the narrative point-of-view. The book is narrated by willfully silent Chief Bromden—the film mostly takes McMurphy’s point-of-view. Without a voice-over, it would have been near-impossible to stay true to the source, but the result leaves the novel’s narrator mostly on the sidelines—along with many of his thematic concerns. Nonetheless, actor Will Sampson imbues the towering Bromden with deep pathos, empathy, and comic stoicism. When he finally speaks, it’s almost like we’ve been hearing his voice all along (see above).
3. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
“Miss Jean Louise, stand up! Your father’s passing.” If this scene (above), doesn’t choke you up just a little, well… I don’t really know what to say.… The sentimental adaptation of the reclusive Harper Lee’s only novel is flawed, righteous, and loveable. Gregory Peck is Atticus Finch (and as far as adaptations go—despite the brave attempts of many a fine actor—is Ahab as well). And the young Mary Badham is Scout. Robert Duvall makes his screen debut as kindly shut-in Boo Radley, audiences learn how to pronounce “chiffarobe”…. It’s as classic a piece of work as the novel—seems almost impossible to separate the two.
4. Apocalypse Now (1979)
Francis Ford Coppola and screenwriter John Milius—the Hollywood character so well caricatured by John Goodman in The Big Lebowski—transform Joseph Conrad’s lean 1899 colonialist novella Heart of Darkness into a grandiose, barely coherent, psychedelic tour-de-force set in the steaming jungles of Vietnam. Brando glowers in shadow, Robert Duvall strikes hilariously macho poses, Martin Sheen genuinely loses his mind, and a coked-up, manic Dennis Hopper shows up, quotes T.S. Eliot, and nearly upstages everyone (above). Roger Ebert loved the even longer, crazier Redux, released in 2001, saying it “shames modern Hollywood’s timidity.” Novelist Jessica Hagedorn fictionalized the movie’s legendary making in the Philippines. How much is left of Conrad? I would say, surprisingly, quite a bit of the spirit of Heart of Darkness survives—maybe even more than in Nicolas Roeg’s straightforward 1994 adaptation with John Malkovich as Kurtz and Tim Roth as Marlow.
5. Trainspotting (1996)
Danny Boyle’s adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s addiction-themed first novel—or rather collection of interlinked stories—about a scrappy bunch of Scottish lowlifes may be very much a product of its moment, but its hard to imagine a more perfect screen realization of Welsh’s punk prose. Character-driven in the best sense of the phrase, Boyle’s comic Trainspotting manages the estimable feat of telling a story about drug addicts and criminal types that doesn’t feature any golden-hearted hookers, mournful interventions, self-righteous, didactic pop sociology, or other Hollywood drug-movie staples. A sequel—based on Welsh’s follow-up novel Porno—may be forthcoming.
And below are 10 more selections from The Guardian’s top 50 in which—I’d say—film and book are both, if not equally, great:
6. Blade Runner (1982) 7. Dr. Zhivago (1965) 8. Empire of the Sun (1987) 9. Catch-22 (1970) 10. Lolita (1962) 11. Tess (1979) 12. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) 13. The Day of the Triffids (1962) 14. Alice (1988) 15. Lord of the Flies (1963)
So, there you have it—my top 15 from The Guardian’s list of 50 best adaptations. What are your favorites? Look over their other 35—What glaring omissions deserve mention (The Shining? Naked Lunch? Dr. Strangelove? Lawrence of Arabia? The Color Purple?), which inclusions should be stricken, forgotten, burned? (Why, oh, why was the Tim Burton Charlie and the Chocolate Factory remake picked over the original?) All of the films mentioned are in English—what essential adaptations in other languages should we attend to? And finally, what alternate versions do you prefer to some of the most-seen adaptations of novels or stories?
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